Family, Psychology, Science

"Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." So wrote Leo Tolstoy in Anna Karenina.

Families can give healthy identities, and financial and emotional security to their members. At least much of the time. Sometimes however, they fail to provide one or more of these good things. But dysfunctional families are interesting to read about and and such reading often gives us good insights into problems in our own families, playing something like the role that support groups give us.

To read reviews about a book or order it, click on its title. To quickly reach one of the subtopics immediately below, click on it.

| Adoption/Foster Care | Child Abuse/Abandoment | Dysfunctional Family | Psychology | Science |

Adoption / Foster Care


Bridge, Andrew. Hope's Boy: A Memoir . Hyperion, 2008. A boy’s decade in foster care.

Burroughs, Augusten. Running with Scissors . Picador, 2002. The author’s mother gives him up for adoption to her bizarre therapist.

Ellerby, Janet Mason. Following the Tambourine Man: A Birthmother's Memoir Writing American Women . Syracuse University Press, 2007. Author’s experiences of unplanned pregnancy, adoption and how those events shaped her life.

Gammage, Jeff. China Ghosts: My Daughter’s Journey to America, My Passage to Fatherhood . Harper Perennial, 2007. Couple adopts two daughters from China.

Hopgood, Mei-Ling. Lucky Girl: A Memoir . Algonquin, 2009. Girl given up for adoption by Chinese birth parents is raised in America; years later the two families meet.

Moorman, Margaret. Waiting to Forget: A Motherhood Lost and Found . W.W. Norton & Co., Inc., 1998. As a teen, author was forced to give her daughter up for adoption; later they were reunited.

Rowell, Victoria. The Women Who Raised Me: A Memoir. Amistad, 2008. Child grows up in foster care to become a ballerina and performer.

Child Abuse/Abandonment

Anderson, Walter. Meant to Be: The True Story of a Son Who Discovers He Is His Mother's Deepest Secret - A Memoir . Harper Collins, 2003. A man learns that his actual father was his mother’s long ago Jewish lover.

Bragg, Rick. The Prince of Frogtown . Vintage, 2009. Bragg attempts to retell the story of his father, vilified as an abusive drunk in the earlier works, to determine what made him the way he was.

Conroy, Pat. My Losing Season . Bantam Books, 2003. Memoir of Conroy’s senior year at The Citadel in Charleston, S.C. and his relationship with an abusive father.

Dumas, Pie. Pieces of Pie: Surviving Love . Skye's the Limit Publications, 2005. A story of a life of child abuse, world travel, and how the human spirit survives.

Wolff, Tobias. This Boy's Life: A Memoir . Grove Press, 2000. Teenager moves with his divorced mother from Florida to Utah to Washington State to escape her violent boyfriend, only to have to deal with a new, abusive stepfather.

| Adoption/Foster Care | Child Abuse/Abandoment | Dysfunctional Family | Psychology | Science |

Dysfunctional Family

Holroyd, Michael. Basil Street Blues: A Memoir . W.W. Norton & Co., Inc., 2001. On growing up in a dysfunctional family.

Hughes, Babbette. Lost and Found: A Daughter’s Tale of Violence and Redemption . The Permanent Press Publishing Company, 2000. The effects of growing up in a dysfunctional family on the author's life.

Rabin, Nathan. Big Rewind: A Memoir Brought to You by Pop Culture . Scribner, 2009. As seen through the lens of formative cultural influences of a writer whose parents abandoned him and who spent time in a mental hospital, an adolescent group home and a drug-ridden co-op house.

Recknagel, Marsha. If Nights Could Talk: A Family Memoir. St. Martin’s Griffin, 2002. Author tries to help her nephew escape the dramas within their wealthy dysfunctional Southern family.

Family

Johnson, Jonathan. Hannah and the Mountain: Notes Toward a Wilderness Fatherhood . University of Nebraska Press, 2005. Bittersweet memoir about a young financially precarious couple, who finish and live in an Idaho log cabin after which the wife twice gives birth to stillborn infants.

Lewis, Michael. Home Game: An Accidental Guide to Fatherhood . W.W. Norton & Co., Inc., 2009. A father’s observations on the first year of life for each of his three children.

Matthews, Sebastian. In My Father’s Footsteps: A Memoir . W.W. Norton & Co., Inc., 2004. The poet remembers his father, also a poet, after his death.

Psychology

Kaysen, Susanna. Girl, Interrupted. Vintage, 1994. A woman's breakdown in her college years and her two subsequent years in a psychiatric hospital.

Pepperberg, Irene. Alex & Me: How a Scientist and a Parrot Discovered a Hidden World of Animal Intelligence--And Formed a Deep Bond in the Process . Harper Collins Publishers, 2008. Author’s groundbreaking research in animal cognition and her related 30 year relationship with a parrot which mastered more than 100 words and answered questions that had hitherto been considered beyond the capabilities of birds.

Saks, Elyn R. The Center Cannot Hold: My Journey Through Madness . Hyperion, 2008. Professor of law and psychiatry suffers from paranoid schizophrenia.

Sayer, Derek. Going Down For Air: A Memoir in Search of a Subject . Paradigm, 2004. University professor explores his past through psychoanalytic and linguistic theory.

Science

Batterson, Anne. The Black Swan: Memory, Midlife, and Migration . Five-week trip across the U.S. to observe migratory birds.

Dragg, Anne Innis. Pursuing Giraffe: A 1950s Adventure . Wilfrid Laurier Univ. Press, 2006. On a year spent studying wild animals in Africa.

Lord, M.G. Astro Turf: The Private Life of Rocket Science . Walker and Co., 2005. Daughter of Mars Pathfinder Mission engineer explores male culture of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

Mauseth, James D., Kiesling, Roberto, and Ostolaza, Carlos. A Cactus Odyssey: Journeys in the Wilds of Bolivia, Peru, and Argentina. Timber Press, 2002. Three scientists studying cacti.

Sargent, William. Writing Naturally: A Memoir . University Press of New England, 2006. A science writer on his life spent in the company of people such as Margaret Mead and on ways to create a science writing career.

Watson, James D. Avoid Boring People: Lessons from a Life in Science . Knopf, 2007. Nobel-prize winning DNA scientist integrates his life story with lessons and advice.

Watson, Lyall. Elephantoms: Tracking the Elephant . W.W. Norton & Co., Inc., 2003. Naturalist on a lifelong love of elephants.